Watch a De-Aged Tom Hanks Span Time in the Trailer for Robert Zemeckis’s ‘Here’

It’s been 20 years since director Robert Zemeckis unleashed a nightmarish CGI Tom Hanks on the world in The Polar Express. Now he’s back with a new cinematic abomination.

Here reunites Tom Hanks with his Forrest Gump co-star Robin Wright, and like Gump, the story will cover several decades of its characters’ lives. For almost the entire film, the camera will be fixed in one position of a living room where the characters will live out their lives. And you know that means: distracting de-aging tech!

De-aging has been used in limited ways for many years but it didn’t really get a workout until 2019 when The Irishman, Gemini Man, and Captain Marvel applied it to their stars extensively. It wasn’t a disaster, it just wasn’t great. It created a kind of uncanny valley in which your mind is constantly aware that something’s off. That’s because there’s more to aging than just wrinkles. Like high-frame rate photography, I thought we’d learned our lesson. But Robert Zemeckis has never been one to say that it’s too soon to go buck wild with a burgeoning technique.

The director told Vanity Fair that he thinks his team has worked out the kinks for Here.

“It only works because the performances are so good,” he told the outlet. “Both Tom and Robin understood instantly that, ‘Okay, we have to go back and channel what we were like 50 years ago or 40 years ago, and we have to bring that energy, that kind of posture, and even raise our voices higher. That kind of thing.”

I’m skeptical. Zemeckis has a lot going against him and the man has spent the new millennium making some of the worst movies of all time. Still, I always come back to see what he’s cooked up and I have some hope for this one. The cast is great. The script is co-written by Eric Roth who has a lot of outstanding credits (Dune, The Insider) to his name. And the source material comes from an acclaimed graphic novel of the same name. None other than the legendary cartoonist Chris Ware reviewed the novel in The Guardian and gushed that “A book like this comes along once a decade, if not a century,” and said its author “has introduced a new way of making a book.”

So, check out the trailer for yourself and tell us what you think of the de-aging in the comments.

The movie hits theaters on November 15.